Miley Cyrus attends the 82nd Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., January 5, 2025. (Photo by Daniel Cole/Reuters)

Japan's Riku Miura perform with Ryuichi Kihara, not seen, during the pairs free skating at the ISU Four Continents Figure Skating Championships at the Mokdong ice rink in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, February 21, 2025. (Photo by Lee Jin-man/AP Photo)

A prototype battery-powered plane, called Greased Lightning or GL-10 is pictured flying at NASA's Langley Research Center in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters May 1, 2015. The plane, which has 10 engines and can take off like a helicopter and fly efficiently like an aircraft, is currently in the design and testing phase. (Photo by Reuters/NASA)

A girl presents the new Oktoberfest beer festival mug in a Oktoberfest tent in Munich, southern Germany, on August 21, 2014. The world famous beer festival Oktoberfest will takes place from September 20 to October 5, 2014. (Photo by Christof Stache/AFP Photo)

Members of the Russian Red Army Choir perform at Water Front Theatre in Beirut September 13, 2014. (Photo by Jamal Saidi/Reuters)

A P-51 Mustang named “Charlotte's Chariot” from the Southern Heritage Air Foundation flies past a cloud of smoke and fire from a nearby battle reenactment during the Wings Over Houston Airshow in Houston, on Saturday, November 1, 2014. Battle reenactments are part of the yearly show held at Ellington Airport. (Photo by Kar Hlava/AP Photo/Bay Area Citizen)

With temperatures soaring and summer well underway, countless Americans will be spending their Independence Day weekend at the beach. Here we revisit some classic images from the turn-of-the-century to the 1930's of vacations by the sea, from Coney Island to Santa Monica.

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.